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5 Tips for Starting Your Own Website

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, 5 Tips for Starting Your Own WebsiteStarting your own website can be a daunting thought, but there is really nothing that should be holding you back. Creating a professional-looking website is easier than ever, and you do not need crazy computing skills to pull it off.

When you do start your own website, these five tips can help you to make sure it gets the best possible start.

Have a Plan

Creating your website is much easier when you have a plan for what you want it to look like.

Your site must be organized in a way that is easy to navigate for your visitors, and this is much more difficult to create without a clear idea of what you want your website to look like.

Before you start building your site, make sure you have a clear idea of how you want it to be structured. With the help of marketing consulting services, you can really narrow down your plan and focus on what’s going to make your website successful.

Speed

One thing you have got to pay close attention to is the speed of your website. If you load your site up with loads of plugins and big multimedia files, then it is really going to slow down your site, and this makes people bounce away from your pages.

For every second that it takes your page to load, you increase the likelihood that your visitor will bounce away from it without engaging with the content, and this will negatively affect your SEO.

Keep things simple, and make sure your pages load quickly.

Mobile Usability

For several years now, more mobile searches have been performed each day than on desktop. Not only does this mean your users need a site that works well on mobile, but it is one of the key things that Google, and the other search engines will look for.

Even today, though, with mobile traffic forming such a large part of internet usage, many websites are not fully optimized for mobile.

Make sure that your content is entirely mobile-friendly.

User Experience

We know how it feels when we visit a website that offers a poor user experience – it’s incredibly frustrating.

When you work so hard to bring people to your website, you cannot afford to be driving people away by having glaring user experience errors on your pages. The internet gives people lots of options, and if there is something people do not like about your page, they can easily get their information somewhere else.

You want to be getting as much engagement from your visitors as possible by offering a clean, easy to use experience.

Avoid the most common UX errors and make sure you’re not unwittingly driving your visitors away.

Offer Value

You have got to put your visitors at the heart of what you do.

Ask yourself, “how can I offer people value?”

If you can offer people lots of value with your website, then you are going to find that people respond to it and engage with your brand.

When Google and the other search engines see lots of people are enjoying your content, then they are going to want to get in on the party and start ranking you at the top of the ranking’s pages.

SMS & Email Are The Best Lockdown Marketing Strategies

With the world getting used to the pandemic lockdown, businesses are having to get used to the fact that they’re customers are more cautious with their spending. They say that ‘only the strongest will survive’, but in the case of business, it’s those who adapt. Business expenses are also being limited as the same amount of income is not possible in these current times. The one place where you shouldn’t be decreasing spending is your marketing strategy. However, you must now tighten the scope to focus on strategies that will work the best in the current consumer climate. SMS and email strategies are head and shoulders above the rest and here is why.

Opportunity for expression

Email marketing has an advantage that no other marketing type has. You can convey your message in a much broader and thorough manner. You simply have more validity and space, for explaining your message. It’s been suggested that the word count should be between 50-150 but as people have more time on their hands, you could increase that to 100-200.

Ensure that your message during this crisis is pitch-perfect. The tone in which you express your call-to-action is absolutely critical. Don’t convey your products as essential but rather, things that could inject enjoyment or comfort into the customer’s life. As for the content of your email, keep it simple. Display the top discounted products and services through imagery and display how long the sales will be active. People are more likely to check their emails regularly throughout the day now that everybody is at home. This makes your email marketing approach even more important as every word will be absorbed to a higher degree.

Building new relationships

Customers are browsing like never before. Some internet providers are reporting over 50% more internet usage than before as people are working from home. This is a chance that you may never get again. Place a webform on your website so any visitor can type their name and phone number before carrying on to the page. With their contact details in your database, keyword SMS marketing is the strategy you should employ to display deals, discounts and future campaigns. This is how to build an sms funnel using a three-stage approach. Firstly, select a keyword that fits your brand. You could use your brand name with a number or so at the end of the keyword. The middle of the funnel is where you need to keep the customer engaged through broadcasting and drip campaigning.

Live stream confirmation

At the end of each week, using your social media and video sharing platform accounts, update and or acknowledge the campaigns you sent out during the week. Explain to customers what the campaigns were about, such as details on what products you’re discounting and why. You may also wish to give a heads-up to your viewers about future campaigns and what they can expect to keep them enticed and onboard.

With more time on their hands, customers are more open to SMS and email marketing campaigns. Use this time to your advantage by expressing why your products matter and sharing relevant opportunities that could help custom

The Barriers Towards A More Efficient Construction Business

StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Construction Business|The Barriers Towards A More Efficient Construction BusinessIn construction, efficiency is everything. The sooner you are able to see a project on the road to completion, but without rushing it to the point that mistakes are made, the better. As such, finding the most efficient ways to get work done effectively should be a major concern for site managers. Yet, there are significant barriers that could prevent you from having your teamwork at their most productive. Here are a few of them.

Poor planning

The logic behind your planning might be sound. However, it’s the easiest stage to make errors, leading to corrections in the following days. For instance, you could under-estimate how much concrete you might need, meaning you have to take time to buy more concrete and readjust. Good construction management software can help improve your planning processes, as well as taking care of invoices, contractor management, incident reporting, and more.

A lack of accountability

When mistakes are made, it’s important to follow them to the source. Simply put, certain colleagues may be in need of training or being moved to other parts of the project if they are not working well. If you’re not tracking key performance indicators to see which colleagues are affecting overall productivity or, indeed, how certain planning and management decisions affect their individual productivity, it can be hard to nail down the precise solutions you need to put in place.

Waste

Naturally, construction projects lead to a lot of waste. Aside from being unsightly when simply dumped on an empty spot of the site, it can also grow to get in the way of the team, forcing them to work around it and even leading to health risks. Click here to see how post-construction cleanup services can help you keep your project site clear. Have policies to make sure waste is effectively dealt with as soon as its created, not just when it becomes a problem.

Theft

Your team will find it hard to do their work when the tools that they are supposed to use in their work are not where they’re supposed to be. Theft is not just an economic concern in construction, it can threaten the timeline of the whole project. As such, click here to read some tips on how to better prevent thefts, as well as how to better handle them when they do occur.

Starting from scratch

Modular construction is a phase that’s on the rise. Even when construction projects are bespoke, there are still prefabricated elements that you could use to speed up the project some without sacrificing quality. The next time you’re planning out a project, take a look at some of the most highly-reviewed suppliers of modular construction equipment and resources. You could shave a significant period of time off the overall project with the right choice.

With the tips above, you can face the biggest problems plaguing the productivity of your team. Ensuring the right investments and organizational tips will help your site work more cleanly, more smoothly, and more quickly.

What is Transactional Email and How is it Used?

StrategyDriven Tactical Execution Article |Transactional Email|What is transactional email and how is it used?What is transactional email and how is it used?

Definition

“A transactional email is an automatic email sent to a single recipient to confirm a transaction or an event.”

Transactional emails have the highest opening rates because they are a direct response to a previous action; the user is somehow already waiting for them. In general, the click-through rates are incredibly high.

Transactional email is a service email that is sent after a user’s action, for example, a welcome message after registering on a website, a reset password confirmation, an auto-responder, a purchase receipt, etc.

Transactional emails are functional, and they are necessary for the normal functioning of your activity. If they are no longer sent, the function they perform ceases to be fulfilled, which can have severe consequences and cause you to lose many customers. Since transactional emails are so good for marketing, it is vital to ensure that they are delivered correctly to recipients and to trace it accurately.

Difference between email marketing and transactional email

Unlike marketing emails (newsletter type), which are sent in mass, transactional emails are sent to a specific recipient to confirm an action or notify them of an event. Typically, transactional emails include order confirmations, invoices, etc.

Types of Transactional Email

Invoices and receipts

Invoices and receipts can be integrated directly into confirmation emails but are sometimes the subject of a dedicated transactional email.

This kind of transactional email is particularly the case for:

  • Services not requiring delivery tracking
  • Subscriptions requiring the sending of an invoice at regular intervals

Tracking control

Your communication after a sale should not stop at the confirmation email. The various order follow-up emails have a crucial role in managing the wait.

You can send an email to notify your customers of the different stages of the order:

  • Order preparation
  • Shipped
  • Arrival order

Order confirmation

Your customer expects the transactional email the most. It is essential if you sell products or services online.
Pledge of seriousness and confidence for your customers; it must fulfil several objectives:

  • Confirm that the order has been taken into account
  • Reassure the customer
  • Send him all the information necessary for follow-up (order reference, access to his account, customer service contact, etc.)
  • Give him an estimate of the delivery time

This email plays a vital reinsurance role, and it often happens that the user has doubts about taking into account his actions, hence the importance of confirmation emails.

For some customers, ordering online is still something unusual and sometimes anxiety-provoking: a particular order confirmation email should reassure them that you are serious.

Password reset

The password reset email allows you to configure a new password via a single link. It is one of the essential transactional emails to set up: without it, your users who have forgotten their password have no way of being able to access their account!

How to set up your transactional emails?

Transactional emails are based on the SMTP protocol and require a specialised solution to ensure constant and reliable deliverability.

Use a dedicated and reliable solution

The best option is to go through a specialised transactional email services to manage your transactional shipments, such as sendgrid transactional email.

Sendgrid indeed offers many advantages compared to transactional emails included in CMS such as Prestashop, Magento, Woocommerce:

  • Real-time monitoring of performance indicators: deliverability, openings, etc.
  • Ability to customise your templates
  • Optimal and instant deliverability

Using the native solutions of most CMSs, you have no way of knowing if your transactional emails have arrived at their destination!

Separate your transactional mailings from your marketing campaigns

It is also essential to choose a solution that allows the routing of transactional emails to be separated from marketing emails.

Transactional emails are a vital point on your site and should not be penalised by the necessarily lower deliverability of your marketing mailings.

A problem in a marketing campaign can quickly lead to a decline in your reputation with email providers. You must, at all costs, avoid this impacting your transactional mailings.

Tips to Improve Your Transactional Emails

Finally, here are some tips to improve your transactional emails:

  • Keep the email concise and very clear. The user already knows what he expects, so be synthetic.
  • Send them a few seconds after the user action.
  • Use the most beautiful and most uncomplicated model to encourage clicks.
  • Place your contact details at the bottom of the page (footer).
  • Always send from an active address, better if authenticated.
  • Pay attention to the subject, and it must indicate the content of the transactional email to make it immediately recognisable in the inbox.

How To Deal With Unpaid Invoices In Business

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Unpaid Invoices|How To Deal With Unpaid Invoices In BusinessManaging cash flow is so important in business, which is why unpaid invoices are such a huge problem. If you have a lot of customers that are not paying up on time, that will soon lead to cash flow issues and it could mean the end of your business if you are not careful. All businesses deal with a few tricky clients at some point, but if it is becoming a regular occurrence, you need to do something about it. The good news is, there are some simple ways that you can get your customers to pay up on time. These are some of the best ways to avoid unpaid invoices and improve your cash flow.

Provide Clear Invoices

If a customer doesn’t want to pay up, they will try all sorts of tricks to avoid the invoice. They may say that they didn’t know that the invoice was due or they might challenge some of the items on the bill to delay payment and try to get a discount. You can avoid that by writing a detailed and clear invoice that breaks down exactly what they are paying for and when the invoice is due. It’s also important that you keep a clear paper trail when negotiating the price and sending them quotes so they cannot claim that the invoice is higher than agreed.

Consider Recurring Payments

If you have clients that use your services on a regular basis, consider asking them to set up a direct debit for recurring payments rather than issuing a new invoice every month. It makes life easier for you and for the customer and if you use recurring billing software, it’s simple to manage. You can make the prospect more attractive to customers if you offer them a small discount in exchange for making recurring payments every month. This gives you a good steady income, which makes managing your cash flow a lot easier.

Build Good Relationships With Customers

If your customers like you, they’ll be more willing to pay up on time, but if you don’t have a good relationship with you then they will be far more likely to leave invoices unpaid. It’s important that you build good relationships with your customers from the outset, and if you do, you will find that you don’t have an issue with unpaid invoices.

Don’t Be Afraid To Chase People Up

Sometimes, business owners are afraid to chase people up because they don’t want to damage their relationship with customers. However, if you allow people to get away with paying invoices late, they will take advantage of you and the problem will only get worse. It’s best to be clear from the beginning and if people have not paid, call them up and ask them where the money is. In most cases, people will pay up and if they decide that they don’t want to work with you again in the future, you just have to accept that and consider it a win because you don’t have to deal with a tricky customer anymore.

Follow these steps and you should be able to avoid any unpaid invoices in the future.